What direction do emotions run when movies mirror current events?

A deadly threat off the coast of Tokyo. Horrifying TV news footage. A wall of water roaring onto a beach. Mass evacuations. Plumes of smoke.

Pass the popcorn.

You are watching a movie. Or at least I was a few nights ago, sitting in a dark theater watching fictional scenes that bore a jarring resemblance to the real-world crisis in Japan.

The comparison goes only so far, of course. The destruction in "Battle: Los Angeles" is wrought by aliens, not an act of nature. Still, Sony Pictures Releasing International canceled the movie's April 1 Japanese release.

The closer match is the Clint Eastwood-directed thriller "Hereafter," which opens with a graphic scene of an Asian tsunami destroying a coastal city. Warner Bros. pulled it from Japanese theaters and promised to donate a portion of DVD sales toward relief efforts.

But given enough distance or time, watching a cinematic crisis can be mesmerizing, even comforting. Seemingly impossible challenges are overcome. The good guys triumph. The characters you care about most survive. The human race endures.

And then you pay your multiplex parking fee and go home.

Such is the historic appeal of catharsis.

"Audiences since the beginning of civilization have wanted to watch stories of disaster," said Zayd Dohrn, who teaches playwriting and screenwriting at Northwestern University.

"People need to see disaster happen in the safe space of dramatic storytelling," he said. "Through empathy, we experience the things these people experience, but never at the risk of our own mortal beings. It's like the fear on a roller coaster; a safe kind of fear."

However, he said, there are times when the fear doesn't feel safe.

"Audiences are not going to want to watch something too close to a real-life thing that is happening at that moment," he said. "Obviously, it can come too close for comfort."

Watching a cinematic tsunami "wouldn't be cathartic for somebody who's lost a family member" in a real one, he said.

But disaster movies can also bring comfort, said Ron Falzone, associate professor of film and video at Columbia College Chicago. Demand for "Die Hard" and "The Towering Inferno" spiked after 9/11, he said.

"I think part of it is, what do we use movies for? To salve our wounds," he said.

Moreover, "we find our comfort a lot of times in the Bible or in biblically constructed stories. And disaster movies are essentially biblical stories," he said. "There is a group of people … all of whom have different sins, and those sins need to be expunged. God sends a disaster down to expunge those sins."

And though a few good guys die and unseen innocent bystanders are sacrificed, for the most part, "nature wipes out the sinners, and the ones who remain are redeemed."

And though people often say they go to movies to escape reality, he said, disaster movies actually help us connect to it.

"We can't grasp the size or scope of a disaster happening in Japan or Haiti," he said. "If it doesn't happen in our country or with some immediacy, we can't grasp the scope. We look to the movies to give us a sense of scale."

Then there is the sheer visual spectacle of utter, but utterly faked, destruction. I would hate to see Michigan Avenue in front of Tribune Tower turned into rubble in real life. But I loved seeing the way it was made to look that way during the shooting of "Transformers: Dark of the Moon." How many of us will see the movie for the strange pleasure of watching our city get destroyed?

It's like watching that famously shocking scene in "Independence Day" where the White House is blown up, said Dohrn.

"The White House is this symbol of stability and power. To watch it blown to smithereens, you get a transgressive thrill."

Although not one I would have wanted to see on Sept. 12, 2001.

What we want to see in disaster movies, Falzone said, is a different reality, one in which we are not helpless.

"We want to have this salving," he said, "this sense that any situation could be survived, that if this happened again, if Steve McQueen just happened to be around, we could get around it."

And the more the world seems to spin out of control, the more I am drawn to a place where the world is facing just one crisis at a time; where the quirky scientist is always vindicated; where a ragtag group of heroes always coalesces to save the day; where nature is tamed, evil is punished and children are saved.